Spotify has redesigned its home page on the ubiquitous music-streaming app to function more like TikTok with the ability to keep scrolling down, its feed populating ever more content as your fingers flick the screen.
That’s opposed to its current user interface, where the home page comes to a distinct bottom. But does the new UI actually look like TikTok or Instagram?
The refreshed Spotify feed encourages more vertical scrolling and uses larger frame-filling imagery. It redesigns the home page that once appeared more like a set of album covers. More vertical video on Spotify is expected to come with the change.
Watch a video down toward the bottom of this post.
Spotify Update + New UI for Home Feed
The way Spotify sees it, it has already built a “very effective mechanism for discovery,” as the Spotify exec Gustav Soderstrom explained this week. But Spotify feels that it’s not “optimizing for time spent in the feed,” he added when he unveiled the new home page. That’s right — Spotify is unhappy with how much time you spend with it. It wants more.
Spotify
Now, when you open Spotify, you’ll still see album covers and playlists, as The Verge noted. But you may also spot auto-playing video or an Instagram-like image. If you tap on “Music” or “Podcasts & Shows,” you’ll be in a vertical-scrolling feed that looks a lot like, say, Instagram Stories.
The new home page is intertwined with Spotify’s new AI DJ, a personalized AI guide for Spotify Premium users in the U.S. and Canada that uses artificial intelligence to curate completely custom playlists.
Will New Spotify Home Feed Help Artists?
At Spotify’s “Stream On 2023” event unveiling the new home page, the company gave a demo of the updated app experience. The ability to keep finding content, rather than coming to a stopping point, has Spotify touting its value as a discovery tool.
“The world today pulls us in a million different directions,” Soderstrom said in a press release on Wednesday (March 8). “So the most important thing we at Spotify can do for creators is to reduce the distance between their art and people who love it … or who would love it as soon as they discovered it.”
In the past, some rockers have criticized the overall model of Spotify, which has been reported to pay most artists very little. KISS‘ Gene Simmons once said, “My daughter, Sophie Simmons, had a 10-million viewed single last year. She made $214. Spotify’s taken all the money. The acts are taking a small percentage of one penny per download, which is a crime.”
Watch the New Spotify Experience Demo:
11 Rock + Metal Bands You Won’t Find on Spotify
Spotify doesn’t have everything, even when you’re just looking at rock music from the last handful of decades. To that end, here are 11 rock and metal groups you can’t currently stream on Spotify.